It has become common for various types of online service providers to implement data centers having large numbers of computers and associated resources. In some situations, a data center may be built to provide particular services that are associated with a website or entity. In other situations, a data center may support a number of services that are associated with various websites and different entities. In some situations, network-accessible data centers may provide relatively low level computing resources that can be utilized by developers and other customers for various purposes on a pay-per-use basis.
A data center consists of a large number of similar or identical computers, which can communicate with each other and with other devices over a network. The network may include a local-area network and/or a wide-area network such as the Internet. The computers may be treated as fungible, with different jobs or workloads being dynamically assigned to available computers.
Administration and support for large data centers increasingly involves a number of different support personnel. Furthermore, different support personnel may be located in different parts of the world, even when they are supporting resources within the same data center. For example, local support technicians may be located within the data center itself and may have physical access to the resources within the data center. Other support personnel, however, may access and support the data center from remote locations.
Different support personnel may also use different administrative support tools, and may view collections of resources in vastly different ways. Local technicians may tend to think in terms of physical machines and their physical locations, for example, while higher-level analysts may think in terms of logical or programmatic properties.
Furthermore, different support tools used by different types of support personnel may present information in different ways, and may refer to various properties and parameters in different ways. This can make it challenging for analysts and technicians to collaborate, especially when they are located in different places and are not communicating in person.